Stay Gold, page 18
“What happened to you over New Year’s? You scared me,” I said when I finally saw Daniel.
“Nothing lah, I’m okay now,” he said. “Anyway, you want to go to the Maldives? I just want to be on the beach and chill out for an entire weekend,” he said, already distracted by travelogues on his phone.
“Dude, you’re in hospital,” I said, still shaken over his latest admission.
“Yah, but I’ll be out soon.” He leaned over to show me Instagram photos of piercing blue waters wrapped around cream-coloured atolls.
The next time I went he was scrolling through four-course menus with delicately-plated dim sum, topped with whole pieces of abalone, asking, “Where shall we go for Restaurant Week this year?”
“I’m going to bring my father to watch a Manchester United match at Old Trafford,” he said on my next visit, his itinerary an escape from the general ward.
His enthusiasm made it easy to ignore the intravenous line bleeding a steady drip into his neck, or the interminable hospital stays where doctors tried to work out the precise cocktail of drugs that would stabilise his organ functions.
When I came back from my last Navy deployment I visited Daniel, housed at the Cardiac Care Unit because his weakened immune system couldn’t risk an infection at the regular ward. He was permanently hooked up to a small square machine that whirred as it dispensed dopamine and noradrenaline, drugs his heart now depended on.
“You want to watch Survivor?” he asked, turning up the volume on his MacBook as I tucked myself in at the foot of his bed, wrapping myself in hospital-issued blankets. I thought of the numerous times we had settled on either of our couches anticipating the reality show’s tribal opening notes.
We had settled in to the episode and picked characters to root for when the door to his ward creaked tentatively open. It was his aunt and uncle, stopping by for a visit.
Daniel patiently answered all the same questions he did every time visitors came by – Have you eaten? How are you feeling? What did the doctors say? – while I itched to get back to the show. I only had two days in Singapore until my next trip, had promised my parents I would be home for dinner, and dusk was fast approaching.
They left close to dinnertime, and I told Daniel I had to go too. I’d see him in a week when I was back from Nepal, and we could pick up Survivor where we left off.
“Watch a bit more leh,” he said.
I knew Daniel was reluctant to impose. In all his time in hospital, he had only once before asked me to stay. That was the night before his third open-heart surgery, and he told me he dreaded the morning. Going under and then waking up, the pain of recovery, the persistent dull ache of cracked ribs healing, the sharp searing pain every time he coughed or sneezed, and the first tentative footsteps where his legs threatened to buckle under his weight. All these only if – if – he woke up when he was supposed to. What if he didn’t?
Tears pooled behind his brown tortoiseshell glasses as he spoke, but he didn’t wipe them away, so I didn’t either, just pulled my chair closer to his bedside as his words petered out and he cried soundlessly.
There was nothing I could offer except my presence, no words that wouldn’t sound hollow, so I stayed up late with him that night, until the nurses turned off all the lights in the general ward, and the exit sign glowed an unearthly green.
____________
I didn’t stay for Survivor. “Sorry lah, I really have to go.”
I gave him a tentative hug, careful to avoid the tangle of tubes and wires.
“Tell me all about Nepal when you’re back,” he said as I was leaving. When he lifted his arm to wave I saw the IV line strain at his wrist, and felt a little tug at my heart.
In Nepal I filed away observations to share during my next hospital visit, things I knew he would delight at. Like the pack mules that shared my path, clip-clopping to the next village in a trail of droppings, or the gold-streaked sunsets at the guesthouse each evening, dying daylight settling behind icy peaks.
On the second last day of the trek I trooped wearily into the guesthouse where I would spend the night, turned on my phone to search for an elusive Wi-Fi signal.
Whatever happens from here on, I love you. Don’t ever forget that <3, wrote Daniel, followed by one more text – Call Pratap – and it was deja vu, that night on the ship all over again, my helpless questions answered by only one certainty. The doctors think it’s a matter of days.
As soon as I returned to the city I booked a ticket home, flew back that night amidst a sea of gormless, vacationing strangers.
“This is departure gate?” a Chinese girl asked me for help at the Kathmandu airport and it was all I could do to keep irrational anger out of my voice. My best friend is dying, I wanted to snap. Have a wonderful holiday. Instead I nodded wordlessly, not trusting myself to speak.
Daniel, on painkillers and barely lucid, opened his eyes when I entered the ward.
“How come you came back early?” he murmured.
I wanted to see you while I could. “Nepal was too tough,” I joked.
He lifted the side of his lips in a smirk, “So I was your exit strategy.” He paused, shut his eyes an instant, gathering strength to ask, “You want to give my eulogy?”
Saying yes would have meant conceding the inevitable. Instead I fought helplessness, searching for something else to say, something else I could give him.
“I’ll finish the book we started,” I said.
We didn’t speak much, after that. Daniel lay in silence, his eyes half closed, and I stayed with him.
____________
India enveloped me in a dusty fog. I sidestepped cars and cows and auto-rickshaws, juddering tin cans with engines working overtime. The summer sun blazed, heating the labyrinthine streets around Amritsar’s Golden Temple, and my feet tingled, reminding me where I had left out the sunscreen.
Gopi, my guide on a food tour, led the way. He was wiry but strong, having previously worked as a rickshaw driver, with a shock of black curly hair and a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Walk together, no run, no scared,” he said as I scuttled to his side.
We arrived at a hole-in-the-wall, a dessert kiosk selling gulab jamun – floury, golden brown orbs sizzling gently in a shallow pan. When we approached, the stall owner ladled one out, handing me a solitary ball basking in a pool of syrup.
“Diabetes,” I heard Daniel say, when he pointed out the dessert to me in Little India years ago, “We should try the real thing in India.”
I took a bite and winced. Cloyingly sweet, I scribbled in my notebook, too much for one person. A serving costs 50Rs and should be shared. Later these words found their way into the travelogue I wrote for the Sunday Times.
When it was published I filed the printed pages with my other travel stories – Bagan’s temple trail, Perth’s coastal attractions, Khao Yai’s nature hikes, where Daniel and I had spotted wild elephants five metres before us.
By then I had left the Navy to launch a freelance writing career, where I wrote travelogues and web copy and profiles of everyone from CEOs to migrant workers. I talked to hundreds of people, until I could conduct interviews on autopilot.
Then, one day, I was assigned an interview with a stage-four cancer patient. Ying was in her thirties, with only months to live.
I spent the bus journey to her house trying to psych myself up, unsure of what to expect. Don’t say anything tactless, I told myself, shooting off a few quick Google searches. What not to say to a cancer patient. How to talk to someone with cancer. In the seconds after I rang her doorbell I realised it was a long time since I had been nervous before an interview.
I needn’t have been. Ying was friendly, even bubbly, and I could tell the scarf on her head had been chosen to match her denim jacket and floral dress. Her brows were neatly pencilled, and winged eyeliner lifted the corners of her eyes. In a different world, perhaps we might have been friends.
I had come with a list of questions, but Ying led the conversation. She told me about her accountant parents who grudgingly agreed when she became an art teacher, and her brother, four years younger, who was now her protector. Last night she had stayed up late with her husband, who designed games for a living but couldn’t beat her at Halo 5.
“He says I only win these days because I have all day to practise while he’s at work,” said Ying.
“Is he right?” I teased.
“Of course not! I was beating him long before I got cancer.” Ying rolled her eyes, but there was affection in her voice when she spoke about her husband. They had met in university, been grouped together by chance for a school project. By the end of the semester they were dating; he had proposed the day after their graduation ceremony.
Ying looked wistful. “We always wanted to have children. When we first got married, we spent hours lying in bed planning what to name them, where they’d go to school, where we’d take them for vacation.”
Now they planned her funeral instead. Ying didn’t want wreaths at her wake – what is my family going to do with so many wreaths? – she wanted bouquets of peonies, her favourite flower, in as many colours as possible. She wanted chocolate cake, and ice cream, and for people to laugh instead of cry.
“I don’t want to be remembered as ‘the cancer girl’,” she said. “I want my friends and family to remember me for the way I have touched their lives.”
In that moment I thought of Daniel, how he had fought all his life to be known for more than his condition. I thought of the eulogy I had given for him, how I’d tried to sum up his dreams and accomplishments, to show how much he had to offer. In the end, the biggest difference he made was to the scores of people who loved him.
“They will,” I told Ying. “To them, you are the world.”
Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is a complex congenital heart condition involving a combination of four heart defects that affect the structure of the heart. These defects cause oxygen-poor blood to be pumped through the body, leading to symptoms such as a bluish colouration of the skin in infants known as “blue babies”, and shortness of breath during feeding, play and exercise. In Singapore, TOF affects about 1 in 2000 live births.
Without surgical intervention, children with this condition seldom live beyond their childhood years. Teenagers and adults with TOF often require multiple operations throughout their lifetime, such as to replace leaky or narrowed heart valves.
In Daniel’s case, surgery at 14 months allowed him to lead a fairly normal life. There is no clear explanation as to why or how his body was able to adapt to the limitations placed on his heart.
It takes a village to see a book from idea to page. My deepest gratitude to the following people:
My parents, Hong Meng and Angelina, who gave me the love of language and the freedom to make it my career.
Dean – it takes a confident man to support your partner as she writes about her former boyfriend. Thank you for being there in grief, joy and on all the ordinary days.
Uncle Kumar, Auntie Angela and Melissa, for trusting me to tell Daniel’s story.
My mentor and former professor Andrew, who believed in Stay Gold before I even put pen to paper. Thank you for reading every single draft, and responding with excited praise and honest criticism in equal measure.
The good folks at Marshall Cavendish for seeing the potential in my manuscript, and my editor She-reen for refining it into its current form.
To everyone else who was a part of Stay Gold:
The Anglican Boys – Alex, Alwyn, Ben Chia, Ben Devey, Bryan, Chee Keen, Jeremy, Jovan, Xiao Yu, Yeu Wing. Chis.
Kaveesha, Natasha, Roselynda and Ms Kang. Sean, Haziq, Michael and Auntie Maria. The Party Kakis, SMU friends, and everyone else who was part of Daniel’s life. Thank you for your time and stories, even if not all of them made it into this book.
Lastly, of course, to Daniel Selvakumar. Because I knew you, I have been changed for good.
Clara Lock is a writer by profession and storyteller at heart. She was formerly editor of the Singapore Navy magazine, where she spent many happy days at sea.
She writes about life and travel at www.claralock.com.
Clara Lock, Stay Gold
